El Carmelo Elementary School in Palo Alto used funds raised through the Tacolicious School Project to purchase a maker cart.Credit: Tacolicious

Sara Deseran wanted to fundraise for her child’s school, but she had a full-time job and, as she put it, “didn’t want to help do another freaking carnival.” So she and another mother—“It’s always mothers,” Deseran sighed, loudly enough to surmount the din of the lunch rush at Tacolicious, one of the hip new restaurants lining San Francisco’s Valencia Street—organized a pie contest with local pastry chefs as judges. “It took me so long,” she said, “and we raised a paltry $5,000.” When Deseran’s youngest came home soon after with a teacher’s note requesting donations of Kleenex and pencils, she decided there must be a better way.

“Our revenues are increasing more slowly than our expenses,” San Francisco Unified School District’s director of budget services announced to an auditorium filled with teachers and principals representing more than 100 schools. “Tell us something we don’t know,” someone whispered, eliciting a ripple of disillusioned giggling. Budget cuts are nothing new here, and they explain why “parent fundraising for elementary education in S.F. skyrocketed 800% in 10 years,” according to journalist Jeremy Adam Smith: “With this money, some schools have been able to pay teachers and staff, buy computers and school supplies and underwrite class outings and enrichment activities. These expenses, previously covered by the taxpayers, are increasingly the responsibility of parents.”

Susie Nadler is also a mother and part-owner of a local business. Flora Grubb Gardens—a nursery that has caught Martha Stewart’s attention and been profiled everywhere from Sunset to the New York Times—donates gift certificates to the annual auction for the school her twins attend. When staff returned to campus after summer break to find brown, brittle plants, Nadler and her husband Saul stepped in, arriving in a van. Only a handful of people ever heard about the $2,000 worth of greenery it contained.

But Deseran said she didn’t want to pitch in only sporadically and in a pinch. So from September to May, four Tacolicious locations give 15% of every Monday’s gross proceeds to a local school. They switch schools once a month, ultimately contributing between $3,000 and $8,000 per school to 36 of them a year.

Schools are encouraged to send families (and their friends) to dine at Tacolicious on Mondays, because, Deseran explained, “We can’t have no one come in, or it’s just too expensive for us.” But the increase in foot traffic varies with the community of the school served, and even when it’s up, “Mondays are basically a wash,” Deseran said: “It was never born of like a, ‘We are slow so how can we get people in the door.’ It was born from that sad little letter.”

It would make more financial sense to restrict the program. Houston-based GroupRaise recruits restaurants to give 15-25% of sales to schools that sign up for a fundraiser, but Bridget Letts, the startup’s community marketing specialist, said they require a minimum of 20 confirmed guests. At other restaurants in the Bay Area, like Patxi’s Pizza, fundraisers can be scheduled Mondays through Wednesdays, but customers must mention the school before 15% of their check (excluding alcohol and taxes) is included.

Sharon Holbrook of Cleveland, Ohio said her local grocery chain similarly will contribute a donation equal to 1% of spending to a local school, only if the shopper names one; Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco gives 10% back but signing up for the program requires some effort. It’s a model used by larger shop-to-fundraise programs like AmazonSmile (0.5%) and eScrip (2-3% on average, but up to 5%, for brick-and-mortar stores, according to Joanne Remillard, one of its founders).

Sporting goods chain Sports Basement requires shoppers to join its Basementeer program and specify a particular school in order for 10% of the store’s profit on their purchases to be donated. Many parents don’t catch the subtle difference here, assuming a tenth of what they spend—not a tenth of the margin—goes to the school.

In fact, figuring out the true impact of participation often requires a calculator. Cate Starr was asked to track the shop-to-fundraise numbers for her son’s preschool and was shocked by what she found. One program, she said: “Gave 1% back on some kind of meal delivery service. A typical order would be in the $30-$50 range which is only .50 cents max!” The story gets worse. After the program ended, Starr learned: “Unless your organization earned over $50, you wouldn't receive anything at all. That means parents would have had to spend $5,000 on this one specific meal delivery service.” Thanks to emails promoting the partnership, the company got its name out to parents and their social circles; the school got nothing.

From February to April, families at San Francisco’s Rooftop School received no fewer than nine emails promoting Good Eggs, an organic grocery delivery website. Postcards that read, “Eat well with Good Eggs and raise money for your school at the same time!” sat out at PTA meetings and came home in backpacks. “Room parent” volunteers were offered free sample groceries, and one of them sent parents the following message: “So far, 14 families have joined the Rooftop fundraiser but only five new families! We need at least 10 new families to be eligible for any of the funds from the fundraiser (at least $600 right now).” A Good Eggs representative clarified that schools that fall short of that goal will still receive an as-yet-to-be-determined amount, but acknowledged that it would not be the full 10% of families’ purchases.

That said, most of these programs make a difference, sometimes a big one. For-profit eScrip—which markets itself to merchants as a customer loyalty program—claims approximately $360 million passed along to schools since launching in 2000. The 52 Weeks of Giving program at Patxi’s Pizza locations, including those in Colorado and Washington, has raised over $700,000 since 2004. And just a tenth of the profit on Basementeers’ spending has added up to “$1 million in cash, gift cards and in-kind donations to over 600 local schools since 2010,” according to Sports Basement. “[A]s our company grows and prospers so too should the communities that patronize our stores,” its website reads.

But that raises another question from those with a critical eye. Are most low-income families ordering organic groceries and meals online? What about schools that don’t have active PTAs to enroll in these programs? Like corporate matching—where a business sends a check for an amount equal to one already given by an employee—most shop-to-fundraise initiatives give the biggest boost to schools where families already contribute.

That’s what Deseran thinks is so important about her model: “Literally, we got a Google map and we Googled the closest public schools to our restaurants,” she said, explaining that the couple had no interest in limiting support to their kids’ schools or determining which other ones were most deserving. “Anyone that comes in” to one of the upscale Cal-Mex restaurants “is participating inherently whether they want to or not,” and ultimately, “we send a check and request nothing of them,” she said. As a person who cares about fresh food, Deseran continued, “it would be very easy to say, ‘Oh, this is for the garden program,’” but she believes “it’s important to let schools hopefully make the best choice for what they need.”

At the end of the day, “we have these amazing, dynamic things happening around us,” Deseran said of San Francisco’s booming tech economy, “and we still have this underappreciated, underfunded school system. It blows my mind.”

My qualifications are cobbled together from a series of past lives, including stay-at-home mother (of three), commercial litigator and higher ed lawyer (at the Boston firm formerly known as Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge), English teacher (Crossland High School), federa...